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How a Canadian judge helped preserve the Arctic

For much of Canada’s modern history, the Far North was widely regarded as a great white wasteland, periodically brought to mind by gold rushes, lost expeditions or Robert Service’s “The Cremation of Sam McGee.”

Until, that is, the arrival in 1974 of Justice Thomas Berger and the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry he chaired.

In a country with a rich history of royal commissions and judicial inquiries, it’s worth recalling — as Canada this year celebrates the 150th anniversary of Confederation — what was by most accounts the most influential of them all.

The pipeline inquiry made an environmental and social justice icon of Berger, turned Canadian eyes north for probably the first time, and produced a report regarded as the first iteration of an Indigenous charter of rights.

“We are now at our last frontier,” Berger wrote in a letter accompanying his 1977 report to the federal government. “It is a frontier that all of us have read about, but few of us have seen. Profound issues, touching our deepest concern as a nation, await us there.

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“The North is a frontier, but it is a homeland too, a homeland of the Dene, Inuit and Métis, as it is also the home of the white people who live there. And it is a heritage, a unique environment that we are called upon to preserve for all Canadians.”

Berger had been commissioned by the federal government to investigate the environmental, social and economic impacts of a proposed gas line — “the biggest project in the history of free enterprise.”

The Canadian Arctic Gas Pipeline Ltd. consisted of more than two dozen Canadian and American producers and had proposed a route from the Prudhoe gas fields in Alaska through the Yukon and the Mackenzie River Valley of the Northwest Territories and south to Alberta.

The government, in appointing him, likely had no idea how seriously Berger would take the assignment.

He travelled extensively and took his commission to 35 communities — hearing from Dene, Inuit, Métis and non-Indigenous residents — to gauge public reaction.

Along with hearing from a parade of experts, he gave unprecedented voice to Indigenous people whose traditional lands would be affected.

“For the first time, we provided funds to aboriginal people to put them on something like an equal footing with industry,” he would later say.

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“I went to all the aboriginal communities, I said, “OK, I’m here. I’ll stay as long as you want me to. I want to know what you think about this. You live here, it’s going to affect you, it’s your future.

“And Canadians grew used to the idea that aboriginal people did have something to say and they were going to say it.”

Berger understood that decisions of merit require not just facts and expert opinion, but the right process, a commitment to democracy and a feeling among all participants that they’d been heard.

The Canadian Arctic had been home for more than 5,000 years to “paleo-eskimos” who crossed the Bering Strait or sea ice from from Siberia. Over time, they moved east across the North, adapting hunting techniques to new environments.

Starting in the 16th century, European expeditions came looking for the Northwest Passage, a shortcut to the Far East. In the 18th century, whalers and traders arrived. As usual, missionaries followed, then the RCMP — along with a motley of fur traders, adventurers and prospectors — as the new country of Canada pushed west and north into what was once known as Rupert’s Land.

An oil field worker at a well site near the Mackenzie River in the Northwest Territories. (ED STRUZIK / Toronto Star file photo)

In 1896, in the Yukon basin, George Carmack and his Tagish companions found the richest concentration of placer gold the world had ever known. And the Klondike gold rush was on.

Ever since, the conflict between Indigenous traditional life and resource development in the North played out.

After the Second World War, oil and gas exploration moved steadily northward. And in 1967, large natural gas reserves were discovered in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, which ignited the pipeline proposals that Berger would consider.

Before hearings began, Berger set out criteria for funding various parties — guidelines that legal groups observed would become the gold standard for future participant-funding decisions.

His report, Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland, became a bestseller after it was issued in 1977.

In it, Berger proposed that no construction take place for 10 years, so that Inuvaluit, Dene and Metis land claims could be settled. His recommendation and the evidence on which it was based provided a basis for Northern land-claim negotiations that would take place over the ensuing quarter-century.

He also concluded, in language resonating with sensitivity to local concerns, that the northern Yukon was too susceptible to environmental harm for a project of such magnitude to pass through that part of the route.

“The Northern Yukon is an arctic and sub-arctic wilderness of incredible beauty, a rich and varied ecosystem inhabited by thriving populations of wildlife,” Berger wrote to the government.

“On the Old Crow Flats, in the Mackenzie Delta, and along the Beaufort Sea coast, I have seen the immense flocks of birds that migrate in their thousands to this arctic area each summer.

“I have seen the white whales swimming in the shallow coastal waters . . .I have seen the Porcupine caribou herd in early summer at its calving grounds in the Northern Yukon and the Bathurst herd at its wintering grounds north of Great Slave Lake.

“And in every native village I have see the meat and fish, the fur and hides that the people have harvested from the land and water.”

Berger did more than turn Canadian eyes north to the Yukon, Northwest Territories and what would become Nunavut.

The original pipeline plans were eventually shelved.

Alastair Lucas wrote last year on an Alberta law blog that the “The 35-year northern gas pipeline saga has shaped Canadian environmental and related aboriginal law in a number of ways.”

“Procedural fairness and aboriginal consultation principles were advanced. Perhaps most important, basic values, including early articulations of sustainability, precaution and ecological integrity, values that underpin much of modern Canadian environmental law, were affirmed.”

In the 1970s, gas producers proposed a pipeline route that travelled the Mackenzie River Valley of the Northwest Territories.

In her contribution to a book on commissions of inquiry and policy change, Frances Abele wrote that the Berger Inquiry was significant in the “peaceful revolution” that has changed the political map and adjusted the balance of power in northern Canada.

Berger, in fact, became such an influential Canadian figure that when Cambridge University set up a Canadian Studies Program in 2004, he was invited to give the inaugural lecture.

He later said he hoped his work had helped make Canadians “a good deal more aware” of the North.

Of that there is no doubt.

The Carcross Parrot

If Canadian journalism has an iconic yarn, it is probably the story of Dennis Bell and his Carcross Parrot, a tale that could really only have been set in the Yukon.

Bell worked for The Canadian Press. He aspired to be the European correspondent in London. He was, as bad luck and unfair fate had it, marooned in the bureau in Vancouver.

Legend had it that drink had been taken on the evening when a brooding Bell, stuck for a story to file, recalled a recent assignment he’d been on in Carcross, Yukon.

Inspiration struck.

Bell wrote a story about the “oldest, meanest, ugliest, dirtiest bird north of the 60th parallel.” The bird — which coincidentally bore the same initials as Bell’s employer — was better than 100 years old and had spent most of its life in a bar, surviving fires, blizzards and the torments of generations of sots.

Once upon a time, the parrot drank. Then it got religion and sobered up under the encouragement of a teetotalling proprietor. He replaced the “racy sea chanties” that had been its repertoire with “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”

The parrot had become something of a zealot, couldn’t stand drunks and, as Bell reported, now squawked at any that crossed his path to “Go to hell!”

Anyway, once on the wires, Bell’s story was picked up by the AP and Reuters and flashed around the world. Editors loved it. They wanted more.

And squadrons of reporters were dispatched to Carcross from around the globe. Happily, it wasn’t the easiest place to get to, so Bell — fuelled by the terror of imminent disaster — had a little time with which to work.

A second brainstorm hit him. He had to kill the parrot.

A quick phone call to the sympathetic hotel manager arranged the details of an avian funeral and the bird’s interment.

Crisis solved. And even better, Bell had his second scoop — a report on the tragic and untimely passing of the parrot, just as the world was beating a path to his Yukon doorstep.

For generations of CP reporters who followed, the tale of the Carcross Parrot was much admired and often told. But never topped.

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